" V " A COOL 1 skilled, ., enigmatic first novel by a young Amer- ican named Thomas Pynchon ( Lippincott) , should be read at least twice or left alone. Even its difficulties are difficult to spot. At first, the book is largely surface-mid- dle-of-the-road wnting (with flourishes limited to occasional pale metaphors), a smooth Insh-tenor tone, and conven- tionally unfolding dual narratives. Then odd things begIn happening beneath this surface. Most of the characters, who e queer c;;urnameS are nouns or adjectives, like Flake, Stencil, Profane, v\Tinsome, Ploy, and Sphere, discon- certingly slip out of focus when stared at too long. They indulge offhandedly in such wayward occupatIons as alli- gator hunting in the New York sewers dnd solo exploration at the South Pole. A curious being named V. is introdvced, dnd her identity, never clear from the start, grows increasingl) elusive. Echoes of old myths, swatches of Surrealism, and fat symbols glide by and disappear. One eventually has the sensation of having got tangled up in a sizable Sar- gasso Sea (the book is just under five hundred pages long) crowd- ed wIth unidentifiable fauna and nameless hulks. But at least one blank-faced fact becomes plain after a second reading: Pynchon, half joking, half serious, has no intention of allowing the meaning of his book to crystallize. Instead, he supplies just enough In- formation (some of it red- herring), innuendo, and implication to enable the reader to supply his own guesses. The book, in fact, resembles one of those Add-a-Part phonograph re- cordings, in which one in- strument is omitted, leaving a hole to be filled by in- d ustrious amate urs. (The next logIcal step would be the Add-a- Part novel, in which one or more sug- gested characters are omit- ted, to be filled in by the industrious reader-writer.) Pynchon is not out to em- barrass anyone; one mean- BOOKS Wha ing, he seems to say with a shrug, will do as nIcely as the next. The book has two distinct but in- separable narratIves, which are meted out alternately In bIts and pieces. Benn) Profane IS the hero of the first one. He is-in fictIon and in life-a cliché. Fat, listlec;;s, uneducated, and in his twenties, he takes whatever is offered him-a bathtub in which to sleep, a woman, a bus ticket-and he gives practically nothIng in return. His skills encompass road building, being a night watchman, and alligator hunting in those sewers. He is clumsy and continually at war with inanimate objects, which trip him, pinch him, and slam in his face. Much of his speech is distilled into the expletive " Wh " h . h b . a, w IC ma} e Interrogatory or an expression of resignation or befuddle- ment. Most of his time is spent travel- ling uselessly back and forth on the Times Square-Grand Central shuttle or, when he is out of town, up and down the East Coast. But Profane is an at- tractive figure. He is kindly and easy- going and conscientious about his anti- existence. He is funny, and possibly more astute than he lets on. He is an individu- alist, who runs parallel to, rather than with, his acquaintances, among them rich and poor Beats, sailors, painters, 113 and jazz mUSICIans. One of these fig- ures, Herbert Stencil, is the key to the second narrative. Stencil is in his fifties. In Henry Adams fashion, he invariably refers to himself in the third person singular. He, too, is a ceaseless shuttler, but, unlike Profane, who never goes a ft- er anything, he is in constant pursuit of the mysterious V. (The inanimate and the animate, action and InactIon, myth and fact are pitted agaInst each other throughout the book, and form its skeleton.) WIth the help of papers left by his father (a British agent, drowned off Malta in 1919) and his father's wide circle of subterranean connections, Stencil has fruitlessly pursued V.'s shad- ow up and down the "'-estern world for ten years. (The time of the book IS the mid-fifties, but it ranges back to the eighteen-eighties) He has discovered that V. is probably Victona Wren, a genteel English girl and dabbler in pros- titution who first appears in Florence in 1899. She reappears a few years later in Cairo. In Paris, in 1913, she is name- less and in love with a young female dancer, and in 1 91 9 she turns up in Malta, under the name of Veronica Manganese. She is almost forty now, and has acquired a glass eye with an iris lIke a clock. (One of her lovers in "--,- - / OJ ) cætvl